How do you get young Middle Eastern men to fly a jet full of Americans
into the side of a skyscraper? You tell them their creator will love them
for it and reward them beyond their wildest dreams. But they have to believe
in such a creator first.

To instill this belief you educate them from a very young age. You tell
them things like: in death, the true believer lives. In life, the true
believer, when directed by god, kills unbelievers. In both death and life,
a true believer's happiness is fulfilled by a grateful and all-powerful
god. You keep these thoughts alive by training them to pray five times
a day.

To make sure they don't stray you give them a book of Absolute Truth
and provide interpretation along with it. Since all men by nature desire
to know, as Aristotle claimed, a book with all the answers will be a lifelong
treasure.

Of
course, when Aristotle wrote those words in ancient Greece he had something
a bit different in mind. He sought to understand the world we live in
through reason -- the practice of non-contradictory identification. Reality,
for Aristotle, was the here and now, not some otherworldly realm ruled
by a moral dictator. Aristotle's corpus became a kind of unmoved mover
in itself, setting in motion a chain of events that, in later centuries,
freed men from intellectual prohibitions and eventually sparked the American
Revolution.

But we narrowly missed disaster. His most important works were lost for
centuries, and only rediscovered when, ironically, the followers of Mohammed
came upon them during a military campaign in Syria.

The Lights Go Out

In the years following Aristotle's death in 322 B. C., the independent
Greek city-states fell victim to Rome's imperium. By 146 B.C. Greece had
become a Roman province and was eventually rolled up into the Empire.

When the small city-state was sovereign, men generally had the feeling
of being able to work out their own fate. But "in a large-scale organization
like the Empire," philosophy historian W. T. Jones notes, "it
was obvious one did not control one's own destiny." People became
passive and withdrawn. Over time, their focus shifted from this life to
the one they believed would follow.

Mystery cults flourished in ancient Rome, one of them forming the seeds
of Christianity. How different were Jesus and Aristotle? Aristotle's focus
was man, his tool reason; Jesus' focus was god, his tool revelation. Aristotle
saw man as a responsible adult, Jesus saw him as a child. The good life
for Aristotle was realizing one's potential; for Jesus, it was pleasing
god. Aristotle spoke of the importance of courage, a virtue about which
Jesus had nothing to say. For Aristotle pride was the greatest virtue,
while Jesus taught it was a grievous sin. (To be precise, Aristotle encouraged
"proper pride," a mean between "empty vanity" and
"undue humility.")

When the Empire collapsed in 410, only Aristotle's early works survived,
and those in poor translation. Philosophers in the centuries that followed
became little more than religious scholars who studied and debated fine
points of scripture, always fearful of straying outside the bounds of
orthodoxy under threat of eternal damnation.

Early Christians believed the end of the world was imminent and thus
focused their efforts on their relationship with god. As the centuries
passed and the sun still shined, and as men gradually rebuilt culture
and civilization, an interest in the things of this world began to grow.
The thinkers of this era asked: how do you resolve the conflicting claims
of faith and reason? A fortuitous discovery provided a possible answer.

Aristotle's Return

During the 12th century Arabic armies swept into Syria and other parts
of Asia Minor, a predominantly Greek culture emanating from the conquests
of Alexander the Great. There they found the works of the Classical philosophers,
which they translated from Syriac or Hebraic into Arabic and took with
them as they continued their march into North Africa and Spain.

As the Christians arrived in Spain, especially in Toledo, the two cultures
met, and Christian scholars began translating the Arabic works into Latin
to make them accessible to the West. Included were Aristotle's Physics,
Metaphysics, and De Anima -- three major treatises.

"Men began to feel the temper of Aristotle's mind," Jones writes.
"Here was a method radically different from the authoritarian debates
of earlier medieval scholarship. It was sensationally empirical compared
with anything the West then knew."

Borrowing Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, generally regarded as the era's
greatest intellect, attempted to reconcile faith and reason, dressing
Christian dogma in the respectability of rational argument. Duns Scotus,
in trying to improve Thomas, ended up achieving what he wanted to avoid:
the further isolation of faith from reason. William of Occam, whose famous
razor still guides scientific thought ("What can be explained on
fewer principles is explained needlessly by more"), completed the
separation of faith and reason and released Aristotle's thought unencumbered
by religion into a world starving for knowledge.

Many commentators play down Aristotle's role in leading the West into
the Renaissance, but in fact the assimilation of his thoughts was a watershed
in mankind's history. In stark contrast to Christian doctrine of the Middle
Ages, Aristotle did not believe in a personal god, he did not threaten
man (in the name of love) with eternal torture for disagreeing with him,
he did not see people as "crooked, sordid, bespotted, and ulcerous,"
as Augustine and his followers did. Though his philosophy was incomplete
and not without flaws, Aristotle became man's liberator, showing him how
to use reason to live the best possible life.

Both East and West held the "bomb" of Aristotle's philosophy,
but only in the West did it detonate. While Arabic culture flourished
in many fields, Greek learning never found a secure institutional home
under Islam. For true believers, nothing is more important than salvation.
Fundamentalists came to rule Islamic society and have never lost their
grip.

In revolutionary America, when Aristotle's ethics were dominant politically,
we had the moral courage to fight for our independence. As Christian ethics
intervened in the years that followed, our freedom bowed out to the welfare
state and a suicidal foreign policy.

Mix a repudiation of Western values on one side with a proud display
of such on the other, and getting fundamentalists to fly planes into our
heart is surprisingly easy.

If only the Arabs had embraced Aristotle as we did, what kind of world
would we have today?

George Smith is full-time freelance writer with a special interest
in liberty issues and screenwriting. His articles have appeared on Ether
Zone, and in the Gwinnett Daily Post, Writer's Yearbook, Creative Loafing,
and Goal Magazine. He has a web site for screenwriters and other writers
at http://personal.atl.bellsouth.net/atl/g/f/gfs543/